Although technology may give us acc

Although technology may give us access to new spaces through some new perceptual or physical device, that access will necessarily be understood through the culture’s model of the body. A good example of this is the way in which space travel is imagined in Science Fiction. Most of this writing imagines some sort of travel beyond the speed of light—a necessity if these stories are to link together planets and stars from distant solar systems. Although such a means of travel raises huge problems in our understanding of time and space, often the act of travel itself is imagined very much in traditional physical terms: characters get into a spaceship, it takes off and travels for a certain period of time, and then arrives at another place after a consis-tent interval. Here, the (imagined) technology that gives access to spaces otherwise too distant to be visited is nonetheless imagined through the particular cultural ideas of the human body and travel. Thus we can say that the culture will imagine the physical abilities of the body in particular ways depending as much on its beliefs and values as on its actual knowledge of the science of the body.